Off-highway vehicles such as wheel loaders, bulldozers, and track loaders, for example, have a bucket or other implement to move soil or other objects. The following description of the drawbacks and disadvantages of known vehicles is described herein with reference to a bulldozer. However, those drawbacks apply to other similar vehicles having an implement.
A bulldozer operator typically has two controls that vary the orientation of the bulldozer blade: a tip control and a lift control. The tip control regulates the angle of the blade in relation to the ground. The lift control regulates the blade height, where blade height is a measure of the distance of the cutting edge from the ground. These two controls are not completely independent. For example, decreasing the blade angle will generally increase the height of the cutting edge. Thus, if the cutting edge initially rests on the ground, decreasing the blade angle will raise the cutting edge off the ground. It can be appreciated that having the cutting edge up off the ground during certain operations could severely affect productivity,
The bulldozer operator can manually compensate for the change in blade height by using the lift controls, but it requires skill and diligence because the manual corrections require fine adjustments which are tedious and difficult to perform while managing the other operator tasks associated with bulldozing.
The present invention is directed toward overcoming one or more of these drawbacks.